


Refuge

by youcouldmakealife



Series: Impaired Judgment (and other excuses) [110]
Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M, YCMAL 'verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 23:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21637087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcouldmakealife/pseuds/youcouldmakealife
Summary: More than anything it reminds Jared of that first summer. Like, Jared had curfew at the time, and Bryce had training, but that feeling of just — being excited to spend time together, doing anything, which, yeah, was sex a lot of the time, but also just eating dinner together, or playing COD, or watching something stupid, Jared’s head on Bryce’s shoulder and Bryce distractedly playing with Jared’s fingers. Which they’re doing now; sure, there’s plenty of sex, like, rivalling the amount of sex when Jared was a literal teenager, but they just — they like spending time together. Which, you’d freaking hope so, considering they just signed a contract to keep doing that for the rest of their lives.
Relationships: OMC/OMC
Series: Impaired Judgment (and other excuses) [110]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/849798
Comments: 41
Kudos: 358





	Refuge

Jared and Bryce leave the lake house the next morning after a drowsy breakfast where everyone picks at the catered pastries and Jared’s dad becomes like, omelette on order dude. Chaz declares it the best omelette he’s ever had, Elaine concurring, and Jared thinks his dad _blushes_.

No one else is bothering to leave until the afternoon, some of them not until tomorrow morning, since they’ve still got the run of the place, and it’s still stocked with enough food and booze to probably last a week. Jared wouldn’t want to leave either, if he didn’t have urgent plans to be alone with Bryce in the vicinity of a horizontal surface and a form of lubrication.

They have a lot of sex when they get home.

Like.

A lot.

They don’t even get out of bed the first day, with the exceptions of like, bathroom breaks and raiding the fridge, and yeah, some of that time is spent napping, or just lying companionably side by side, Bryce texting Chaz — Jared does not want to know what Chaz is saying, in case it’s like, the text version of applause — and Jared catching up on the news, pressed together skin to skin. 

It’s not like they’re having sex 100% of the time, but. It’s a significant portion of the time. Not even necessarily like, sex, but like — one minute they’ll be doing their own things, just like, nakedly adjacent, and then Jared will kiss Bryce’s shoulder, or Bryce will roll onto him, and then they’re making out, and things get a little out of hand, and then sex is generally happening again.

It’s up there in the best days of Jared’s life. Definitely wins as the most indulgent, and for sure the most hours he’s spent in a bed with the exception of maybe the time he had a hellish flu as a kid. It’s a full twenty-four hours before Jared leaves their bed for longer than five minutes, and that’s to take a desperately needed shower.

They have less sex in the next twenty-four hours, but that’s only like, in a relative way. Spend more time on the couch than in bed, but are mostly doing the same things on the couch as they did in bed, though they bother to wear their underwear like, most of the time.

It’s a damn good forty-eight hours.

*

It’s not all perfect: Bryce sulks like a little kid when Jared insists on showering alone, because he knows _exactly_ what showering together will lead to, which is shower sex and then shower sex injuries. And they don’t even need the shower to have a sex injury, because at one point when they’re making out Bryce’s engagement ring, still hanging off the chain on his neck, smacks Jared in the eyelid and Jared swears he has a billion little diamond marks embedded on the thin skin when Bryce hands him an ice pack and apologises like, seventeen times.

And they order Thai from their usual place, but Jared doesn’t know if the orders got swapped or someone was new or not paying attention or what, because his usual order is his usual order, except there’s shrimp instead of chicken in his noodles and he can smell shellfish the second he opens his soup, and Bryce is _ridiculous_ when he calls them back, all ‘how can you not see ‘shellfish allergy’ in the notes’ and ‘do you _want_ to kill him?’, like Jared would actually die and not just be moderately to severely uncomfortable if he ate it, which he hadn’t.

Jared is right on the verge of telling Bryce how ridiculous he is when he remembers his dad’s pre-wedding advice, and he bites his tongue and lets Bryce take care of it, even if Bryce’s version of taking care of it is a total overreaction. 

But other than a sulky Bryce, and minor injuries, and Jared’s near death experience — Bryce’s words, obviously, not Jared’s — it’s pretty great. They don’t really get to do this, just hang out together, no obligations at all, no one needing to leave town, or go to training, or practice, or do media. 

More than anything it reminds Jared of that first summer. Like, Jared had curfew at the time, and Bryce had training, but that feeling of just — being excited to spend time together, doing anything, which, yeah, was sex a lot of the time, but also just eating dinner together, or playing COD, or watching something stupid, Jared’s head on Bryce’s shoulder and Bryce distractedly playing with Jared’s fingers. Which they’re doing now; sure, there’s plenty of sex, like, rivalling the amount of sex when Jared was a literal teenager, but they just — they like spending time together. Which, you’d freaking hope so, considering they just signed a contract to keep doing that for the rest of their lives.

The third day he wakes up and it feels like, he doesn’t know, a Sunday, or the last day of March break — he’s still off, he’s going to enjoy the hell out of his day off, but he’s got to get back to school — well, training — so he can’t enjoy it as much as he would if he wasn’t imminently returning to the real world. 

Enjoying the hell out of his day off is more lying around in their underwear in front of the TV. There’s a tiny part of Jared that’s faintly appalled he hasn’t left the house for days, hasn’t put on a shirt in just as long — Bryce has offered to be the one to get dressed every time they order food — but that’s overruled by the rest of Jared that’s very comfortable right now, his head in Bryce’s lap, Bryce’s fingers running through his hair, half-dozing, half-watching Chopped, which is the only cooking show Bryce watches, probably because it’s more focused on humourous roadblocks than the actual food, waiting on an order of pasta and salads. Jared could easily make that himself, but whatever. He’ll go back to being productive tomorrow.

“So hey,” Bryce says. He’s trying to make it sound casual, but it doesn’t, and Jared squints up at him suspiciously.

“I want us to keep wearing our wedding rings,” Bryce says.

“I wasn’t planning on throwing mine out any time soon,” Jared says.

“No, I mean, out,” Bryce says. “Like. Not like we did with our engagement rings.”

“So like—” Jared says.

“Like, on our hands, all the time,” Bryce says. “I want to wear mine tomorrow. And during the season. And I’m obviously not saying you have to if you’re not comfortable with it, but it’d be cool if you did too?”

“You know people will like, notice, right?” Jared asks.

Well, maybe not with Jared. Teammates, sure, but the media probably won’t. If they did notice and actually cared enough to ask about it, ‘my private life is private’ would almost certainly be enough of an answer since he isn’t, oh, Julius. 

Bryce, though? Bryce _is_ Julius. Or like. Not, obviously, but media wise. ‘My private life is private’ wouldn’t do much to head off speculation about Bryce’s personal life from the media and the fans alike. Jared’s early googling of Bryce made it pretty clear he was considered hot as hell by a certain subset of Flames fans — obviously Jared isn’t arguing — and some of the comments about him, prurient shit, made him uncomfortable even before he was dating Bryce. 

Jared doesn’t read the comments on Bryce’s Instagram anymore. It was already something he kind of hated but did compulsively anyway, like picking at a scab, but after some dude called Elaine a MILF when Bryce posted a picture of them on Mother’s Day — and like, it was more explicit than that, the word MILF was featured, but that was the least of it — that was quitting time. Also a firm reminder to never get an account of his own. What if he posted a picture of him and his mom, or him and Erin, and someone said shit? Jared would have to track them down and murder them, and that sounds exhausting and also like it’d open him up to some criminal liability.

Bryce sporting a wedding ring on Instagram? Instant madness from some fans is inevitable.

“Shouldn’t we clear it with our agents first?” Jared asks, when Bryce just shrugs it off. Though he knows what they’d say: fuck no.

“Summers can’t tell me I can’t wear my wedding ring,” Bryce says, then, “Well, he probably would, but fuck him.”

“Bryce,” Jared says.

“Seriously,” Bryce says. “I may not be ready to like, tell people I’m gay, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to straight up pretend I’m not married to you.”

“They’re all going to assume you’re married to a woman,” Jared says.

“I’m not going to be telling them that I am, though,” Bryce says. “I’m done pretending, okay?”

It’s still pretending, really, but it’s not like Jared’s going to be telling people he’s married to a guy either, let alone who the guy is, so it’s the kind of pretending he can’t exactly call out.

“What if Flames PR gets on you?” Jared asks.

“Who cares?” Bryce says. “Fuck them too.”

“Bryce,” Jared says. “You can’t just keep pissing off your front office.”

“Why not?” Bryce says. “What are they going to do, trade me?”

“I mean, they can,” Jared says.

“Sure,” Bryce says. “But I’m coming off a career season and I get to limit it to a ten team list. You think they’d be cool shipping me off to any other Western Conference team to bite them in the ass? Because I can stack it that way if I want. Give them a bunch of divisional rivals and teams that I know can’t clear the cap space for me.”

This is the most downright Machiavellian Jared’s ever heard Bryce be.

He’s so proud of him.

“You sure you want to do this?” Jared says. “Because this is like, a no takebacks thing. And it’s not only going to piss a lot of people off, but it’s going to raise the risk of people finding out about us. By a lot.”

“I know,” Bryce says. “But like, so did marrying you, and obviously no regrets there.”

“It’s been all of three days, so I’d fucking hope not,” Jared says. “Especially since we consummated it like, a billion times, so you’re out of luck for annulment.”

Bryce snorts, runs his thumb along Jared’s temple. “Only if you’re okay with it, though. If you don’t want to, or don’t want me to—”

“It’s your life,” Jared says. “You’re just kind of — it’s a hell of a lot riskier for you than it is for me, you know?”

Bryce shrugs a little. “You’re worth it,” he says.

“And you’re a sap,” Jared says, and rolls over to press his face against Bryce’s belly.

“Stop hiding, you know I think the blush is cute,” Bryce says.

“It’s not cute,” Jared says. “And I’m not blushing.”

“You’re worth like, everything,” Bryce says. “You know that, right?”

Jared presses his face tighter against Bryce’s shirt, Bryce’s thumb tracing the heated shell of his ear.

“So you’re okay with it?” Bryce says.

“If you stop saying nice things to me for like, at least an hour,” Jared says. “Then okay.”

“I’ll do my best,” Bryce says solemnly.

“Okay,” Jared says.

“I love you,” Bryce says.

“Bryce!” Jared says.

“That’s not a nice thing, that’s just like, a fact,” Bryce says. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Jared says, then commences to pull Bryce’s shirt up and stick his head under it, because the only way Jared can maintain the absolute fiction that he’s not blushing is to hide his face.

*

Bryce sacks out early that night, exhausted from his day of lounging around the couch and like, complimenting Jared too much. Jared’s half tempted to poke him awake to just like, not have the honeymoon end yet, but that’s mean. He looks so peaceful, Jared can’t do that to him.

Jared’s not exactly hyped to leave this bubble, get back to reality. He kind of wishes they’d gone on a real honeymoon, a long one, went to Paris or like, Tahiti or something, had weeks to tangle themselves in one another before they separated again. But they have to train. Jared married someone who knows just how important his career is to him, just how much work he has to put into it, and Bryce did the same, and they’ve got to get back to it.

Tomorrow Jared’s got to get back to training, and Arvan is inevitably going to notice that Jared wasn’t so much in the wedding party as was the groom, since he won’t be taking his ring off. One of the grooms, and Jared might tell him that, but he’s not going to be telling him who the other groom was. 

Tomorrow, he leaves the bubble, and he has to get back to lying about his life, at least by omission, because Arvan’s a trustworthy guy — hell, Jared’s trusting him to help him develop his body, trusting him with the thrust of his career — and Jared thinks he knows him well enough to trust him with that part of his career too, but he doesn’t know him well enough to trust him with Bryce’s career. And even if he did, that’d be Bryce’s choice to make, not his. He doesn’t know whether Bryce wearing his ring is the best thing for his career — probably not — but that’s Bryce’s choice too, and Jared won’t lie, the fact he doesn’t want to take it off lights up something warm in Jared.

Tomorrow he’s going back to work, and it’s going to be hard, and he’s probably going to be sore as fuck by the end of it, because the only exercise he’s had in the past week is sweating over his vows and nailing his husband. But the important thing, the thing that matters most, is that when he comes home tomorrow evening, sore, and wiped, and probably a little grumpy, Bryce will be there, or will be on his way. 

And that’s not going to be true when he goes to Edmonton in a month, but Jared keeps thinking about that part of Bryce’s vows when he said that just knowing Jared’s in the world somewhere, even if there’s thousands of miles away from him, that’s enough. He’d have never thought to put it that way himself, but it’s true for him too. 

Maybe they won’t be in different cities forever — well, definitely they won’t be in different cities forever, because one day they’re going to be retired, and they’ll get to spend every minute together if they want. And who knows, it might not even be that far away — they’re both one bad injury away from the dream ending; every single player is one bad injury away from that. Or like, who knows, maybe the Flames will magically give up their star player to their biggest rival, and Bryce will be an Oiler. Probably not realistic, but that’s the thing — Jared doesn’t know what’s going to come. He has no way of anticipating the future, never has. 

He didn’t anticipate being picked by the team he hated most when he walked into the draft, and he didn’t anticipate playing in the NHL when he was fourteen and shorter and weedier than they wanted him to be — he wanted to make the show, fuck he wanted it, never stopped working for it, and thanks to that hard work and a growth spurt just in time to get drafted by the Hitmen, hard work and one more growth spurt after that, he made it. He didn’t walk into that Western Prospects camp anticipating the fact he was going to meet his future husband. Hell, he _hated_ said future husband for all of a week or two, though, admittedly, there was a lot of confused attraction under that veneer of hatred.

Knowing Bryce exists, even if it’s thousands of miles away, knowing he’s there somewhere, wearing a ring Jared put on his finger, a ring that matches the one Bryce put on Jared’s finger, that’s going to be enough to sustain him when they’re apart. It’ll have to be. But right now Bryce is less than a foot away, breathing soft and even in sleep, so close Jared could touch him, and he does. He presses himself up against Bryce’s back, kisses the nape of Bryce’s neck. Bryce makes a soft noise in response, presses himself back against Jared, so he’s not as asleep as Jared thought. Or maybe he is. Maybe it’s instinct. 

Tomorrow they’ll probably wake up on different sides of the bed, Jared rolling away in his sleep from the heat of Bryce’s body, tomorrow they’ll trade showers, and eat breakfast, and go their separate ways for the day, and return to one another, but right now, right now he closes his eyes, and he holds Bryce close, the steady beat of Bryce’s heart reverberating through Jared’s chest.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the final part of this arc of Impaired Judgment. There is going to be a hiatus between the conclusion of this arc and the start of the next, but by no means is this the end of Jared and Bryce's story.


End file.
